Autonomous robots that perform household functions such as floor cleaning and lawn cutting are now readily available consumer products. Commercially successful robots are not unnecessarily complex, and generally operate randomly within a confined area. In the case of floor cleaning, such robots are generally confined within (i) touched walls and other obstacles within the rooms of a dwelling, (ii) IR-detected staircases (cliffs) down; and/or (iii) user placed detectable barriers such as directed IR beams, physical barriers or magnetic tape. Walls provide most of the confinement perimeter. Other, much less ubiquitous robots may try to localize or to map the dwelling using a complex system of sensors and/or active or passive beacons (e.g., sonar, RFID or bar code detection, or various kinds of machine vision).
There are examples of consumer robotic lawn mowers that use a similar “invisible” barrier—a continuous guide conductor boundary proposed for confining random motion robotic mowers by the early 1960's (See, e.g., U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,128,840; 3,550,714). Examples include commercial products by Electrolux, Husqvarna, Zucchetti S. A., Belrobotics, and Friendly Robotics. The guide conductor is intended to confine the robot within the lawn or other appropriate area, so as to avoid damaging non-grassy areas of the yard or intruding onto a neighboring property. The conductor is one continuous loop around the property to be mowed. Although the guide conductor can be drawn into the property in peninsulas to surround gardens or other off-limits areas, it remains a continuous loop, and is energized with an AC current detectable as a magnetic field at a few feet. The guide conductor must be supplied with power, usually from a wall socket. Within the bounded area, the known robots may “bounce” randomly as the robot nears the guide conductor, or may follow along the guide conductor. Some of the mowers also touch and bounce from physical barriers. More complex commercial mowers may try to localize or to map the mowing area, again using a complex system of sensors and/or active or passive beacons (e.g., sonar, encoded optical retro-reflector detection, machine vision).